Palazzo Barberini was the first museum I visited on my trip to Rome, and this ceiling was one of the first painted ceilings I stood beneath in that city. It was a small entrance room, and the fresco was minimal — soft, faint pastel cloud strokes dissolving toward the edges — but at the center, a cluster of cherubs held aloft the Barberini family's bee medallion as though presenting it to whoever walked beneath. I tilted my lens upward and photographed it on 35mm film, thanking the cherubs for their gift. There is something so deliberately gentle about the vision — dainty, whimsical, an offering of peace. And yet standing in Rome, in a city that has survived invasion, collapse, and reinvention more times than any one civilization should have to, the gesture reads differently. These cherubs have been holding that medallion up through all of it, suspended in their soft clouds above centuries of everything peace is not. Their smiles lie but at the same time tell the only truth they knew — what they believed in was worth fighting for. Cherubs is an archival giclée print held in a contemporary black wood frame with gold accents — the gold a quiet echo of the fresco's warm amber tones, the black grounding something that might otherwise float away entirely. This piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.
